End of an EAR-a!.

Sorry for the absolutely grim photo on the intro but i'm afraid i just had to do it. I've never seen a part of me cut off and due to the fact that I'm a pretty weird kind of guy when it comes to things like that... i had to show it off.

As of today (Monday 18th April) i no longer have stretched earlobes. I've been carrying my 30mm stretched lobes on the sides of my face for the just over the last decade or so. For the past few years i've been toying with the idea of having them cut off and stitched up but never really gone any further than just thinking about it.

That was until today... today i went under the knife and had my lobes stitched up.

Due to this type of surgery being an immediately visible one and the end result being quite a different look to what i've had since my early teens, it took me quite a while to find a surgeon who i trusted implicitly with the task of chopping my earlobes off. I found a surgeon called Mr Argawal. Mr Argawal works out of a few different places around and about but i met him at Fulwood Hall hospital in Preston. From our initial conversations, it was quite apparent that he knew exactly what i wanted and he was just on it with what i wanted to achieve with my surgery.

Due to the amount of time spent looking around for the exact surgeon that i wanted to do my ears, time was most definitely not on my side for the healing of them before our wedding. At the time of the consultation, there was just over 10 weeks till i would be tying the knot with my fiancè. I was pretty worried about this, thinking that i was going to be left with dirty, big, 'orrible wounds or scars across my earlobes for my big day but Mr Argawal was more than confident that they'd be healed in time and so, just like that, i was booked in for surgery!

Before & After...

So here are the photos that most of my friends and family have been asking for... the before and after. Needless to say, i'm more than happy with the outcome of my surgery. Mr Argawal has created me an earlobe that looks as natural as i could've hoped for, the stitches are cleaner than clean and everything about them just looks good IMO.

If i was to do this again (which i definitely won't be doing, and if anyone see's me even trying to do this again, i give you complete permission to slap me into next week), i would 100% go back to Mr Argawal to sort me out. I can't recommend him enough. If you're interested in reading about the whole surgery, read on, if not and you just want to see the offcuts, click here...

The Surgery

The surgery was always going to be done under a local anaesthetic so there was nothing new there but as i laid on the bed in the mini operating theatre i started to wonder which part of the surgery i would feel (if any of it). Following a very rigorous clean from my surgeon, he then proceeded to clean my ear, which in all honesty, is a very weird sensation. I don't know when the last time somebody else cleaned my ears for me, but there we go.

It was now time for the administration of the local anaesthetic... turns out this was the most painful part of the whole procedure. Not going to lie... pretty high on the pain threshold but nothing to write home about. Not in comparison to getting the ditch of your arm tattooed anyway.

The one thing that will stay with me forever though is the sound of sutures being put in. It's insane!!

As the anaesthetic started taking hold, my ear lobes became very, very cold and also felt absolutely huge?! Obviously i can't see my ears without the aid of a mirror (which i didn't have at that moment) so i don't think that was the case but they genuinely felt like really chubby hotdogs dangling from my face. Every time he touched them, it felt like they were 10x the size they were... very weird indeed.

As i had a cold towel placed over my eyes (which was very much welcomed) i pretty much just went into relaxation mode. As weird as this might sound, it's weirdly soothing having someone play with your ears.

I think because i couldn't see anything except cooling darkness, my hearing became a lot more acute. I mean, i was having surgery on my ears so i guess that i'd be hearing things very closely anyway, but this was the weirdest part of the whole operation.

Listening to scalpels cutting through the flesh of my lobes but not actually being able to feel anything is a crazy sensation. I started creating mental imagery of what was actually happening out there and because my lobes were feeling bigger than ever before, it all felt a bit strange. The one thing that will stay with me forever though is the sound of sutures being put in. It's insane!! It sounded (and felt) like a piece of shipping rope. Every single bit of texture on the suture being dragged through my ears made the same noise as rope.

Once both ears were finished off and i was all nicely stitched up, it was time to leave, just like that. Just over an hour in surgery and i was 2 earlobes down.

Offcuts

For those of you (like me) with the weird obsession with needing to see the aftermath of surgery... here's the money shot ;)